The opening sex scene is a really funny and effective opening but is not put forward as the most rewatchable scene. — Bill Simmons
Barinholtz's introduction at the office, smoking a joint outside and talking about bringing the baby to a concert and about Grindr, is an early pick. — Bill Simmons
The neighbors meeting that morphs into the history of frat inventions, with uncredited Lonely Island and Workaholics cameos, is liked. — Bill Simmons
The keep-it-down material and the marriage make the first 25 minutes dead on; showing up for the first party and getting sucked in, with Rogen's shirt off, is called probably the favorite scene. — Bill Simmons
The short Robert De Niro party is loved: the Taxi Driver mohawk, Franco doing a Fockers De Niro really well, and Carmichael as Sam Jackson at a different party base. — Bill Simmons
Also praised: the attempt to make peace at the party while she pushes Franco toward Efron's girlfriend, the short hungover breastfeeding scene, the fake off-probation letter with the hotbox party, and the partly improvised Abercrombie & Fitch final scene. — Bill Simmons
Going to the first party and then getting sucked in and getting high is named right after the question. — Bill Simmons
The favorite part of the movie by far is the 'Who's Batman to you?' conversation, a perfect explanation of how equal and apart the two men are. — Sean Fennessey
It has to be the first party, starting with keep it down. — Chris Ryan
Running the keep-it-down line about 15 times prompts mixed feelings that improv may have hurt tightly scripted comedy like City Slickers, though Efron and Byrne can hang with the improv. — Chris Ryan
The others mock this nostalgia for scripted comedy and its Robert Towne references, while agreeing ad-libs that crack up the crew are why these comedies run past two hours.
Tarantino's scenes are the Silver Surfer scene, the Star Trek Captain Kirk exchange, and the dialogue about the submarine films The Enemy Below and Run Silent, Run Deep. — Bill Simmons
The hosts cite a 1995 Premiere article saying Denzel confronted Tarantino on set about the N-word in his films and refused to take it private; per GQ, Denzel later apologized and called him a fine artist, and Denzel's daughter was a PA on Django. — Bill Simmons
Robert Towne got an urgent call from Simpson and Bruckheimer to rewrite the nature-of-war scene and dictated it over the phone while they recorded. — Bill Simmons
Dinner for Five with David Milch and Jon Favreau is recommended for Milch's story of a Simpson rewrite call; the 7 a.m. texts are called far milder than Simpson. — Chris Ryan
High Concept, a biography of Simpson, is recommended as salacious and fascinating. — Bill Simmons
The hosts say Robert Mueller as FBI director often quoted Hackman's 'we're here to preserve democracy, not to practice it'. — Bill Simmons
After a two-year process, including videotaping the lieutenant commander Denzel based his performance on, the U.S. Navy pulled out once it learned the script involved a mutiny. — Bill Simmons
The Navy had backed Top Gun; Tony Scott responded that if mutiny never happens, why is there mutiny training for naval officers. — Bill Simmons
Dave Grusin's piano score; the name Mitch McDeere; the Cayman Islands as a locale; nineties Cruise; the cast as a whole; the Memphis setting; the foresight in casting future character actors
The soundtrack, controversial at the time, has aged the best: Dave Grusin's piano is a character in itself, adding humor, melancholy, romance and suspense, recurring in themes such as the guitar on Beale Street and the drive by the river, and it puts Grusin on the Who Won the Movie list; it is called one of the best scores of the last twenty-five years and was Oscar-nominated, though polarizing when released.
Mitch McDeere is a great name; the Cayman Islands have always aged well as a mysterious locale; nineties Cruise is a peak era, and the hosts miss having an actor you buy season tickets for, floating Emma Stone, Miles Teller, Damon and Leo.
The totality of the cast and the Memphis setting, an emptied, fading southern metropolis, have aged well; on rewatch Mitch and Abby are themselves idiosyncratic, a self-made striver and a more moneyed wife, which reads as a Clinton-era, sell-out-or-not story that David Rabe and Robert Towne were obsessed with.
The character-actor foresight has aged well: Dean Norris and Tobin Bell as the two assassins before Breaking Bad and Saw, Terry Kinney before Oz and Billions, and Margo Martindale as the secretary, classic Pollack casting where the eighteenth most important person is a great actor.
Nominees: 'do you read me, the list is in the open', already flagged; Kittredge's line that dying slowly in America can be a very expensive proposition, guessed to be Robert Towne or David Koepp; 'you've never seen me very upset'; 'relax Luther, it's much worse than you think'; and Kittredge wanting Don Lowe (as transcribed) manning a radar tower in Alaska by the end of the day, just mail him his clothes.
Ethan's speech to Kittredge about how devastated a man who crushed, shot, stabbed and detonated five members of his own IMF team would be by hauling Mom and Uncle Donald to the county courthouse sounds like an Aaron Sorkin leftover; one host's favorite remains the screamed 'my team is dead', but 'you've never seen me very upset' is iconic and icy and is picked for the dialogue sparring in that scene.
The movie is in a race against time as digital life changes; it was weirdly prescient about wireless streaming video, while things like Netscape no longer make sense; the first nominees are the Hitchcockian vibe of drawing on 1950s and 1960s Hitchcock for an espionage movie, especially in the Prague sequence, the cat-and-mouse format of the set pieces built on ducking into rooms, masks, disguises and hanging from places rather than buildings falling, and Cruise's performance.
Casting great actors in supporting roles is argued to hold up: Voight at the right stage of his career to be Phelps, a character from the television series; Manuel Bear (as transcribed), an actress few American filmgoers had seen; Jean Reno coming off Leon the Professional with his dickishness; Ving Rhames, who becomes the only other connecting figure in the series along with Monaghan; Kristen Scott Thomas, Vanessa Redgrave, Emilio Estevez and Henry Zerny (as transcribed), later of Sharp Objects, all lived in and knowing what movie they are in.
The Prague sequence is bittersweet because two or three movies of the Estevez, Kristen Scott Thomas and Cruise team would be welcome; it is set up like Alien with people who know each other, down to the wife's coffee and the barn in Kiev, and the scene where Cruise and Kristen Scott Thomas make out while tracking the arms dealer shows legitimately good chemistry, if less than Cruise's with Vanessa Redgrave; killing off those movie stars 35 minutes in is called a Hitchcockian twist like Janet Leigh in Psycho.
Estevez's line about lasagna while showing Cruise the chewing gum explosive is a favorite; red light green light and 'you've never seen me very upset' show Robert Towne style dialogue sprinkled throughout, and the hosts assign roles: Koepp the genius of action plotting, Zalian (as transcribed) the dramatic storyteller, Towne the king of memorable lines, with Tom Cruise movie starring on top.
De Palma's visual flair under control is the final nominee: the deep-focus shot where Don Lowe (as transcribed) is dressed down by Henry Zirny's (as transcribed) CIA character before being sent to Siberia, a charismatic look unlike same-looking modern blockbusters, stylish and fun where a Villeneuve film never makes you laugh; De Palma's playful visual style is named the pick.
The friendship and the interpersonal relationships; Damon's performance; the two Elliot Smith songs; Casey Affleck's I Hate LA shirt; the Boston accents other than Robin Williams's; the 'how about them apples' scene; the ending; Robin Williams's and Ben Affleck's clothes; the dialogue
The friendship, since this is really a buddies movie about the bonds of friends; Damon is great and it is hard to believe he did not win the Oscar over Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, a two-person category that year with Duvall for The Apostle, Peter Fonda and Dustin Hoffman for Wag the Dog; As Good As It Gets won Best Actor and Best Actress for Helen Hunt while Titanic won Best Picture, and everybody was fine with it when Jim Brooks was still one of the ten most important writer-directors.
The two Elliot Smith songs, Between the Bars and Miss Misery, one still not available on iTunes; his life went into a tailspin after the famous Academy Awards performance in the white suit where he seemed delicate and out of place, and the anecdote that he told anyone trash-talking Celine Dion to shut their mouth because she chilled him out before he went on.
Casey Affleck's I Hate LA shirt in the baseball scene, which one host owned as a kid and whose son is a year from growing into; the Boston accents are spectacular except Robin Williams, and Cole Hauser's is a little iffy in spots but he seems and looks like he is from Boston and carries the fuck-you attitude of the character.
The how-about-them-apples scene has aged incredibly, with the great ending and the callback you always forget is coming; Robin Williams's cardigans and things that don't match make him look like a widower who shops at Goodwill but still has some authority, and Affleck's clothes seem a little more expensive than they were, trying to look classier.
The interpersonal relationships between Damon and Affleck and Damon and Williams could be put in a movie from 1940 or 2018 and would still play.
The friendships are the easiest answer, mainly because of everything that happened afterward, so they are always connected forever; a case could be made for the how-about-them-apples scene, which people still say today and laugh at every time. — Shea Serrano
The apples line was apparently taken from Chinatown, the line Jack Nicholson has in that movie, so maybe Robert Towne wrote Good Will Hunting; I Swallowed a Bug, which Casey Affleck ad-libbed, was taken from Apocalypse Now; the dialogue has aged best because every line was on the tip of the tongue on rewatch, 60 lines recited while watching, which is unique and a testament to them sticking to their guns about their script.
You can understand why people suspected a Goldman rewrite because the movie is so obviously the sum of their love of movies: the playground fight is Mean Streets watched a thousand times, with Ordinary People and early Scorsese elsewhere; that Damon and Affleck stayed friends adds to it, this being their proxy movie.
